Coinspeaker
Robinhood Eyes UK Market with New Hirings Already Underway
Robinhood Markets Inc (NASDAQ: HOOD) is preparing to venture into the UK market according to LinkedIn job postings in the past two weeks. Notably, Robinhood has been posting new jobs focused on the United Kingdom market to expand its operations. Two weeks ago, Robinhood posted a job advertisement on its LinkedIn searching for a senior risk and compliance associate to be based in London. The company specified that the candidate should have at least six years of compliance practice experience specializing in financial services in the United Kingdom.
On Monday, the company posted another job advertisement for a compliance officer based in London. The candidate is expected to focus on several issues including money laundering reporting responsibilities. Most importantly, Robinhood announced the job advertisement for an operations lead in London to help support the launch, improvement, and scaling of its operations in the UK. While the other positions can be based out of the United Kingdom, the operations lead is expected to be located in London.
The company has been diversifying its operations outside the United States following increased regulatory scrutiny in the recent past that was triggered by the implosion of FTX.
Robinhood Flees Hostile US Market
In the past few years, Robinhood has found itself at loggerheads with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission for violating certain investment rules. At the tail end of 2020, Robinhood agreed to pay $65 million to settle the charges filed by the SEC. Notably, the SEC has charged Robinhood for routing its customers’ trade orders to other broker-dealers without the profits we disclosed.
“..Principal trading firms attempt to profit from executing large volumes of retail buy and sell orders either by taking the other side of customer orders and exiting the positions at a profit, which is also known as “internalization”, or by routing the orders to other market centers,” the SEC noted.
Robinhood has also been under regulatory scrutiny following the meme stock frenzy that involved GameStop Corp (NYSE: GME). The regulatory scrutiny recently pushed Robinhood to delist several crypto assets including Cardano (ADA), Solana (SOL), and Polygon (MATIC) from its platform. The decision to delist the mentioned crypto assets was caused by Binance and Coinbase Global Inc (NASDAQ: COIN) charges of listing unregistered securities.
What does this mean for customers? Everyone who holds Solana (SOL), Polygon (MATIC), and Cardano (ADA) will receive detailed instructions on how to sell and/or withdraw their coins, where supported. (3/4)
— Robinhood (@RobinhoodApp) June 9, 2023
Nonetheless, Robinhood stated that it remains hopeful the crypto market in the United States will thrive once a clear regulatory framework is put in place.
Market Outlook
Robinhood has a reported monthly active users of about 11.8 million and a total of $78 billion in assets under custody. During the first quarter, Robinhood announced its net revenue increased by 16 percent to about $441 million. As a result, HOOD shares have gained about 54 percent YTD to trade around $12.56 on Tuesday.
